Toggle light / dark theme

Traditionally we’ve been taught the Earth has four primary layers. Though, a distinct change at depth suggests there’s another.

Fresh evidence concerning the possibility that Earth’s inner core has a separate inner core of its own was published in Nature Communications.

In the new study, Thanh-Son Phạm and Hrvoje Tkalčić from the Australian National University collated data from existing probes.


Rost-9D/iStock.

Ever wondered what our solar system might be like with an earthlike planet —- or one even five or six times larger —- orbiting between Mars and Jupiter?

Conventional theory has long held that the gravitational influence of Jupiter would have ripped any terrestrial mass planet to shreds or never allowed it to form there at all. But a new paper just accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal argues that a “hypothetical planet” ranging from one to ten earth masses located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would wreak havoc on our inner solar system within a timeframe of only a few million years.

There’s been much speculation about whether the solar system could safely harbor an additional planet between Mars and Jupiter where most of our asteroids are located, Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California in Riverside and the paper’s lead author, told me via email. This study shows how such a planet would destabilize planetary orbits, he says.

The fungal pathogen that wipes out much of humanity in HBO’s latest series The Last of Us is real, but can the cordyceps fungus actually turn humans into zombies one day?

“It’s highly unlikely because these are organisms that have become really well adapted to infecting ants,” Rebecca Shapiro, assistant professor at University of Guelph’s department of molecular and cellular biology, told Craig Norris, host of CBC Kitchener-Waterloo’s The Morning Edition.

In the television series, the fungus infects the brain of humans and turns them into zombies. In real life, it can only infect ants and other insects in this manner.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is still doing its job — and doing it very well. Released today, this image shows the arms of barred spiral galaxy NGC 1,433 teeming with young stars that can be seen affecting the clouds of gas and dust around them. The image was taken as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) collaboration, of which more than 100 researchers around the world are a part.

One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first science programs is to image 19 spiral galaxies for PHANGS with its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which is capable of seeing through gas and dust clouds that are impenetrable with other types of imaging.

Antarctica — icy, empty, desolate, cold — these are words you may use to describe it, but it hasn’t always been that way.

There was once a time when the great southern landmass was covered in forests and dinosaurs roamed free. How could such an icy wilderness once have been so warm that it could support Earth’s most gigantic creatures?

Telomeres – the protective caps at the tips of chromosomes – can encode two proteins, something that was previously thought impossible, new research has suggested. The discovery of genetic information coding for these proteins, one of which is elevated in some human cancers, could have huge ramifications for the fields of health, medicine, and cell biology.

“Discovering that telomeres encode two novel signaling proteins will change our understanding of cancer, aging, and how cells communicate with other cells,” study author Jack Griffith, the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a statement.

“Based on our research, we think simple blood tests for these proteins could provide a valuable screen for certain cancers and other human diseases,” Griffith, who is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, added. “These tests also could provide a measure of ‘telomere health,’ because we know telomeres shorten with age.”

What is Prompt Engineering?

Artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing, has a notion called prompt engineering (NLP). In prompt engineering, the job description is included explicitly in the input, such as a question, instead of being provided implicitly. Typically, prompt engineering involves transforming one or more tasks into a prompt-based dataset and “prompt-based learning”—also known as “prompt learning”—to train a language model. Prompt engineering, also known as “prefix-tuning” or “prompt tuning,” is a method wherein a big, “frozen” pretrained language model is used, and just the prompt’s representation is learned.

Developing the ChatGPT Tool, GPT-2, and GPT-3 language models was crucial for prompt engineering. Multitask prompt engineering in 2021 has shown strong performance on novel tasks utilizing several NLP datasets. Few-shot learning examples prompt with a thought chain provide a stronger representation of language model thinking. Prepaying text to a zero-shot learning prompt that supports a chain of reasoning, such as “Let’s think step by step,” may enhance a language model’s performance in multi-step reasoning tasks. The release of various open-source notebooks and community-led image synthesis efforts helped make these tools widely accessible.